8 Exercises For An AWESOME Core!!
Give these 8 exercises a try to build a strong core.
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You Are Wonderful
Fitness is not perfect. Fitness is wonderful.
To be perfect is not the goal of getting fit. You are already perfect the way you are. Perfection is unattainable. There will always be someone skinnier, stronger, with a nicer butt, better arms, and a perceived better life.
Chasing perfection is a no win game, because no one is perfect. We all have our imperfections and things about our bodies that we don’t like, but it’s those imperfections that make us unique and who we are.
Using fitness to try to build the perfect body shouldn’t even be the goal, but yet that is exactly what the magazines portrait that you should chase.
Instead fitness should be used to make you wonderful. It should make you feel wonderful. It should make you feel like you are a better parent because you are in shape and able to play with your kids without getting tired. Fitness will give you the ability to experience more in life and have wonderful moments. It is in these moments that life will feel perfect.
Nothing will ever make you perfect, but with fitness we are going to make you feel wonderful.
Need a Fitness Kickstart? Click the image below to get started.
PNF Workout of the Week
PNF Met Con “Workout of the Week”
- Battling Rope Slams
- Box Jumps
- Kettlebell Swings
- Kettlebell Squat & Press
- TRX Rows
- 20 seconds on, 40 seconds off, 6 rounds
Enjoy and be awesome this week!
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching check us out here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-kickstart/
PNF Workout of the Week 2/27/17 – Kettlebell Carry Circuit
Get your week started with this “Kettlebell Carry” workout. While the workout may sound simple, this may be one of the most challenging workouts you’ve done.
20yd Farmers Walk (single arm)
10 Goblet Squats
20yd Farmers Walk (opposite arm)
10 Swings
20yd Racked Farmers Walk (single arm)
10 Cleans
20yd Racked Farmers Walk (opposite arm)
10 Snatches
20yd Overhead Carry (single arm)
10 Overhead Presses
20yd Overhead Carry (opposite arm)
10 KB Windmills
Repeat for five rounds.
You can make this more challenging, by increasing the distance carried, carrying a bigger bell, or adding more rounds. But, no matter how you decide to do it you will get one heck of a total-body workout.
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/
Fitness Over 50 Doesn’t Have To Be Chair Aerobics
It is inevitable that as you age your body will change. Sure it would be great to go back to how you looked and felt in your 20’s, but that shouldn’t even be the goal. The goal should be to be the best version of what you can be today.
Getting older does not mean that you cannot ski, hike, workout, and be intimate with your partner well into your golden year. Fitness promotes all of those and more.
However, the way the fitness industry has approached fitness over 50 sucks! A Google search will turn up numerous articles about walking, some even with hand weights. Or worse yet, sitting in a chair lifting tiny vinyl coated dumbbells. This is 2017, not 1980.
Exercise doesn’t have to be some watered down, soft nonsense. In fact, it is stuff like this that is patronizing, rather than helpful. People can still exercise hard, lift heavy weight, and bang out push-ups and pull-ups well into their 80s. If trained to do so and not led to believe the B.S. that they can’t because they are “old”.
It is common for many of our members to bring their college and young adult aged kids with them to their workouts when they are home and have the parents who are 30-40 years older run circles around them. So much for the 20’s being the fittest years of life.
As the body ages it needs strength training more than ever and can still be trained hard. The biggest difference is in the frequency. While a 20-something maybe able to workout everyday, eat pizza, drink beer, and stay out late and not miss a beat in their workout, you just can’t recover quiet as fast when older. But, three challenging workouts per week based around strength will do wonders for the body.
Maintaining strength and mobility is the secret to aging well. Getting older is the only option we have, whether we like it or not. But, staying fit and strong with age is a choice. You can choose to look at age as only a number and challenge yourself in workouts to stay strong and mobile, or you can buy into the B.S. that someone this age shouldn’t be doing this.
Age is only a number, the way we train is a mindset.
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5 Strategies To Eating Healthy On The Road, Or In The Air
Another cross-country flight and yet another day spent eating meals in an airport.
You know that planning your meals is an important part of staying lean and healthy. But, how do you plan when you have lay overs, flight delays, and need to be extra early just to waste time waiting in long lines to be searched by a grumpy TSA Agent.
Here are five strategies to make the most of eating healthy when your days in spent traveling through airports.
#1. Carry and emergency stash. Stock up on a bag of nuts, beef jerky, and a piece of fruit. Pack one of each in your carry-on and then restock in the airport when one or all are gone.
#2. Meat and veggies. In those rare times when you actually get the chance to sit down in an airport restaurant for a meal, skip the burger and fries and order a piece of grilled fish, steak, or chicken with extra veggies.
#3. Be calorie conscious. Most fast-food convenience stores and coffee houses now list their choices on the menus. Look for the lower calorie options and make your choices based around those.
#4. Go easy on the pre-flight, in-flight, and layover booze. Sure a drink may seem like just what is needed after a day of connecting flights, meetings, and yet one more flight home. But, all these extra drinks will wreck havoc on your fitness goals. If you know that your business meeting with customers will most likely result in drinks at some point, then skip the airport booze all together. If they don’t then a drink or two between a connection with your meal isn’t the worst thing.
#5. Drink lots of water. Flying will dehydrate your body and a busy schedule can make it easy to forget to drink some water throughout the day. If you always keep a bottle of water with you there is better chance that you will drink more water.
Keep the above strategies in mind on your next business trip and you won’t have to worry about losing the progress that you’ve worked so hard to gain.
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/
Regular Exercise Is Simpler Than You Think
You do not have to spend hours in the gym everyday, or even go to gym at all to stay fit. The following are four simple ways to incorporate exercise into your life.
#1. Walk twenty minutes to thirty minutes most days. Done consistently walking will improve your cardiovascular fitness and help you shed a few pounds. Take it up a notch by carrying a 20-40 pound backpack.
#2. 50 minutes, twice a week. Hitting the gym twice a week for a good total-body workout will reward you will numerous benefits when done consistently ovetime. In a years time this is enough to see a completely different person staring back at you in the mirror.
#3. A daily bodyweight routine. Ten to twenty minutes of the following circuit will keep you fit to be able to tackle all of your daily activities.
- Push Ups x 25
- Squats x 25
- Pull Ups x 5
- Reverse Lunge x 15 each
- Front Plank x 60s
- Jumping Jacks – 25
- Repeat for as many rounds as possible in 10-20 minutes. Rest as needed.
#4. Reps on the Minute. Some days you only have time for a quick 10-minute workout. That is where the “Reps on the Minute” strategy works great. Pick and exercise, start a timer, and perform a set number of reps. Then rest the remainder of the minute. Continue for 10 rounds.
Here are a few examples:
Kettlebell Swings x 25 reps
Squat and Press x 15 reps
KB Snatch x 10 each arm
Battling Ropes x 40 slams
Regular exercise doesn’t have to take a lot of time, it just has to be consistent
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/
One Awesome Workout You Can Do Anywhere
Get your week started with this awesome bodyweight workout. No equipment necessary.
- Bodyweight Speed Squat
- Push-Up
- Reverse Lunge
*Reps = 10-1 (10 reps round one, nine reps round two, eight reps round three, and so on down to one.)
4. 15 Jumping Jacks after each round
Have a great week!
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/
Athletes Have Off-Seasons, Do You?
Athletes have off-seasons, do you?
The off-season allows the body time to recover. No athlete would ever try to compete and perform at a high level year-round, because this would wear done their body.
While athletes’ have off-seasons, the regular exerciser never does. Instead he or she goes to the gym 3-4 times per week, pushes hard, and expects to see results without ever slowing doing. They then wonder why joints get achy, strength decreases, and body fat occasionally increases.
The body is tired. It has been pushed hard for months on end. Not to mention that this pace has continued through a stressful life event or two, and more weekend hangovers than proud to admit.
Occasionally taking a week or two off from exercise is good for the body. It allows the muscles to get fully rested and recovered and come back stronger. This is especially true when strength plateaus are hit or weight loss stalls. Give the body some time to rest and those plateaus can be then be broken through.
If you have been working out consistently for six months or more you could probably benefit from a week off. Then continue to take a recovery week once every 16-20 weeks. During this week still eat well, maybe get a message, take a few walks, but skip your regular workouts.
Recovery is part of training, but it is the most often neglected part.
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/
Move It, Or Lose It
Move to keep moving.
The only reason people lose the ability to move and do things like getting up and down from the floor is because at some point that movement stopped happening in life.
When a movement is no longer performed, deconditioning and poor ability to move in that pattern happens.
This then leads to pain in the movement, which further leads to a fear of moving because movement hurts, or once on the floor there may not be the strength to get back up.
And finally the fear of movement leads to a lack of any movement and overall decreased health.
We get our clients up and down from the floor, teach them to regain and restore their ability to squat, to hinge and swing a kettlebell, to crawl, to carry a heavy sandbag, and get moving well again.
Movement is life and life is movement.
If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/